Great garden gag gone viral

It’s illegal to have a garden in New Zealand, according to the great garden gag of this week. If you missed news of this gag, let me fill you in.

Users of the social media platform, Reddit, played a tremendous joke on the internet this week. A stream of comments on a Reddit forum, from 2014, went viral. The thread had started with a user asking:

"My friend told me he heard that you can't have a garden in New Zealand. That it is illegal. I'm not sure if this is true. I Googled it, but got no founds. Could you guys please tell me? And please no hate I know this question might be insulting to some of you".

With stories of protests, riots, arrests, gestapo, and the detrimental effects on our agricultural economy if we were allowed gardens, New Zealanders were quick to jump on the bandwagon and support the comment thread in all its artificial truth.

Now, two years on, in the midst of our New Zealand avocado shortage, there has been a resurgence of stories on the feed. This time the thread has gained attention and made its way to the front page of Reddit, and so in sight of users from outside of New Zealand.

What can marketers learn from this?

Never lose hope for your old content - you never know when you might get the chance to recycle content, and it might even go viral!

Create content on a human level. If people feel a sense of solidarity with content you create, they will become interested, get involved, and share it. And that sense of solidarity might only come from a shared sense of humour, or the fact that avocados are too darn expensive.

Be convincing. Many uniformed Reddit users may have, at least for a moment, been convinced of the truth of all this - considering its hundreds of comments and thousands of upvotes. Whatever content you create, do it with authority. Inform and educate (though, we would advise not to lie ...).

Content can be tricky to create, on the regular, yet a business always wants to stay top of mind. If you need a content boost, then let us know and we’ll see what we can create together.